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Cosmic Microwave Background seen by Planck. Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

Despite earlier reports of a possible detection, a joint analysis of data from ESA’s Planck satellite and the ground-based BICEP2 and Keck Array experiments has found no conclusive evidence of primordial gravitational waves.

The Universe began about 13.8 billion years ago and evolved from an extremely hot, dense and uniform state to the rich and complex cosmos of galaxies, stars and planets we see today.

An extraordinary source of information about the Universe’s history is the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, the legacy of light emitted only 380 000 years after the Big Bang.

ESA’s Planck satellite observed this background across the whole sky with unprecedented accuracy, and a broad variety of new findings about the early Universe has already been revealed over the past two years.

But astronomers are still digging ever deeper in the hope of exploring even further back in time: they are searching for a particular signature of cosmic ‘inflation’ – a very brief accelerated expansion that, according to current theory, the Universe experienced when it was only the tiniest fraction of a second old.

Galaxy groups are the most evident structures in the nearby universe. They are important laboratories for studying how galaxies form and evolve beyond our own Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way and the Great Spiral in Andromeda. Exploring the nature of these extragalactic “herds” may help to unlock the secrets to the overall structure of the universe.

Unlike animal herds, which are generally the same species traveling together, most galaxies move through space in associations comprised of myriad types, shapes, and sizes. Galaxy groups differ in their richness, size, and internal structure as well as the ages of their members. Some group galaxies are composed mainly of ancient stars, while others radiate with the power and splendor of youth.

These facts raise important questions for astronomers: Do all the galaxies in a group share a common origin? Are some just chance alignments? Or do galaxy groups pick up “strays” along the way and amalgamate them into the group?

The simulations took several months to run at the “Cosmology Machine” in Durham and at “Curie” in Paris, among the largest computers used for scientific research in the U.K. and France, respectively. Astronomers can now use the results to study the development of galaxies from almost 14 billion years ago until now. The results will be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on 1 January.

or years, astronomers have studied the formation of galaxies using computer simulations, but with limited success. The galaxies that formed in previous simulations were often too massive, too small, too old and too spherical.

The galaxies formed in the EAGLE-simulation (Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments) are a much closer reflection of real galaxies thanks to the strong galactic winds, which blow away the gas supply needed for the formation of stars. EAGLE’s galaxies are lighter and younger because fewer stars form and they form later. In the EAGLE simulation these galactic winds – which are powered by stars, supernova explosions and supermassive black holes – are stronger than in earlier simulations.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have made the first determination of the mass and other properties of a very young, distant galaxy cluster.

The Chandra study shows that the galaxy cluster, seen at the comparatively young age of about 800 million years, is the most massive known cluster with that age or younger. As the largest gravitationally- bound structures known, galaxy clusters can act as crucial gauges for how the Universe itself has evolved over time.

The galaxy cluster was originally discovered using ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory and is located about 9.6 billion light years from Earth. Astronomers used X-ray data from Chandra that, when combined with scientific models, provides an accurate weight of the cluster, which comes in at a whopping 400 trillion times the mass of the Sun. Scientists believe the cluster formed about 3.3 billion years after the Big Bang.Link To Full Story

Galaxies are the result of an evolutionary process started thousands of million years ago, and their history is coded in their distinct components. The CALIFA project is intended to decode the galaxies’ history in a sort of galactic archaeology, through the 3D observations of a sample of six hundred galaxies. With this second data release corresponding to two hundred galaxies, the project reaches its halfway point with important results behind.

The CALIFA Project allows not only to inspect the galaxies in detail, but it also provides with data on the evolution of each particular galaxy with time: how much gas and when was it converted into stars along each phase of the galaxy’s life, and how did each region of the galaxies evolve along the more than ten thousand million years of cosmic evolution.

Thanks to the CALIFA data, the astronomers have been able to deduce the history of the mass, luminosity and chemical evolution of the CALIFA sample of galaxies, and thus they have found that more massive galaxies grow faster than less massive ones, and that they form their central regions before the external ones (inside-out mass assembly).

Scientists believe they have found a way to explain why there are not as many galaxies orbiting the Milky Way as expected. Computer simulations of the formation of our galaxy suggest that there should be many more small galaxies around the Milky Way than are observed through telescopes.

This has thrown doubt on the generally accepted theory of cold dark matter, an invisible and mysterious substance that scientists predict should allow for more galaxy formation around the Milky Way than is seen.

Now cosmologists and particle physicists at the Institute for Computational Cosmology and the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, at Durham University, working with colleagues at LAPTh College & University in France, think they have found a potential solution to the problem.

Writing in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the scientists suggest that dark matter particles, as well as feeling the force of gravity, could have interacted with photons and neutrinos in the young Universe, causing the dark matter to scatter.

University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomer R. Brent Tully, who recently shared the 2014 Gruber Cosmology Prize and the 2014 Victor Ambartsumian International Prize, has led an international team of astronomers in defining the contours of the immense supercluster of galaxies containing our own Milky Way. They have named the supercluster “Laniakea,” meaning “immense heaven” in Hawaiian. The paper explaining this work is the cover story of the September 4 issue of the prestigious journal Nature.

Galaxies are not distributed randomly throughout the universe. Instead, they are found in groups, like our own Local Group, that contain dozens of galaxies, and in massive clusters containing hundreds of galaxies, all interconnected in a web of filaments in which galaxies are strung like pearls. Where these filaments intersect, we find huge structures, called “superclusters.” These structures are interconnected, but they have poorly defined boundaries.